Group

This month’s edition of the EUROfusion‘s Newsletter reported on the research done by the fusion community on Plasma Turbulence using as an example the last Transport Task Force Meeting, which counted with the presence of our Fusion group member Felipe Nathan de Oliveira.

The meeting, held at Leysin, in Switzerland, was attended by various scientists from around the globe and was an important step in the efforts of a global community in reaching the same goal, a clean and limitless energy source.

The Joint European Torus (JET) is going to take a well-earned shutdown after the 2015-16 experimental campaign which is believed to be one of the most successful campaigns of JET history.

According to the Head of the JET Exploitation Unit, Lorne Horton, “the campaign had three highlights: rehearsal of the procedures for future tritium-tritium and deuterium-tritium experiments, the hydrogen campaign during which physicists learned about the dependence of plasma parameters on the mass of the hydrogen fuel used, and the high-power deuterium campaign. And all these experiments achieved expected results.”

This week, 14-18 November 2016, Mervi Mantsinen and Felipe Nathan de Oliveira have participated in the 2017 Planning meeting of EUROfusion Work Package on Medium Size Tokamaks (WP MST1) at the Max-Planck Institute for Plasmaphysics, Garching, Germany.

Our fusion group has recently expanded its research activities to the simulation of fusion reactor materials, in particular investigating the formation and evolution of radiation generated defects in metal alloys.

Due to the complex character of these alloys, an accurate treatment is often only posible up to some hundred atoms. The BigDFT code, co-developed by BSC, has potential to go beyond this limitation and treat systems which have not been accessible so far.

From 2nd to 4th of November, the BSC Fusion group member Felipe Nathan attended the “HPC methods for Computational Fluid Dynamics and Astrophysics” held at CINECA, the facility which hosts the supercomputer Marconi-Fusion, the new European High Performance Computer for fusion applications.

Last week, 24-26 October 2016, our fusion group member Shimpei Futatani attended the ITPA Meeting in Naka, which provides a framework for internationally coordinated fusion research activities.

Shimpei gave an oral presentation on his work ‘Non-linear MHD modelling of pellet triggered ELMs’ at the meeting. The work contributes to the physics understanding of pellet triggered ELM in JET and ASDEX Upgrade tokamaks and has been carried out within EUROfusion, the European Consortium for the Development of Fusion Energy.